Court Trial Stars Economist Telling NCAA To Pay Players

There’s an antitrust trial going on between the NCAA and 20 former players, which has people talking about how the NCAA could find a way to pay their players someday. A sports economist believes he has found a way to do it, and presented his case during the trial late last week–mostly based on the system where the NFL players are paid via broadcast rights.

University of San Francisco economist Daniel Rascher testified that the college football players would make hundreds of thousands of dollars if they were paid part of the broadcast rights to game. College basketball players could make over $1 million in some cases of four years if the broadcast revenues were split equally between the schools and players. The numbers seem large and that’s why something like this won’t happen.

The NCAA doesn’t want to be paying any college athletes–but the only way that is going to work is to get rid of all the video games with player images. That would just be the start, too. Rascher says that he’s worked on other models that would give players as little as 10%, too. We know that all of of these intriguing theories likely won’t ever get applied to real life. It’s still fun to see them getting entered as part of a court record.